| Bloody Technology |
| Kings, drug addicts, hackers. What do they have in common? They all create or find their universe for the explicit purpose of defining their lives. I have nothing against Kings or drug addicts, but I REALLY have something against technology. I look like a computer literate person, and for the most part I am. However, I have a strong dislike towards technology, abstract and impractical thought, and complacency. Oh, I suppose I have to support that or something. Brillthar. If that is how it must be, then I will attempt to show the problems with technology. Probably the most annoying thing in the world is a person who chooses to be complacent. I can understand and sympathize with someone who never finds their "niche" in the world, because no person ever truly belongs. Therefore, someone who realizes the problems in the world and in himself and dies a sad, horrible, ill-fated death in front of millions of TV viewers will earn me more respect than a highly successful author that has educated millions of people the world over, but remains complacent in thought. Just for rhetorical purposes, it would be beneficial if I defined what I meant by complacency. I mean when a person reaches a state of contentness that makes them feel like they are right, and everyone else is wrong. They subscribe to newspapers that adhere to their beliefs, and tune out arguments that come from the "other side." Or, in the technological sense, they believe that man has a right to create machines and choose to enhance their skills at the expense of a practical education. The liberal arts are instrumental to the development of a person's psyche, in my humble opinion. By diving still further into the world of science, cyptography, and computer science, we sacrifice our most valuable possession. Uncertainty. If there is one thing that saves mankind from utter damnation, it must be the fact that we always question ourselves. Is this right? Am I a good person? Technology is non-human. It focuses on the sciences ostensibly for the benefit of mankind. Benefit? You mean "efficency." Real efficency is not measured in productivity, lifespans, or even in simplicity. Efficency is non-human. By focusing our lives to adapt to a changing world, we are ignoring the pressing desires and needs of our innermost psyche: love and humanity. Sure, technology can bring us together. I can talk on the phone to a friend and write emails to others at the same time. Has that brought me closer to the ones I love? More or less, no. We can do everything we want to do, in our bedroom. Conversation, that used to revolve around dinner and dates. Now we can talk on the phone to relatives and girlfriends. For God's sake, sex used to be between two people on a bed, now it can happen in a chat room. That, my friends, is conveinance. And you know what? I don't like conveinance one bit. I don't want to hide my emotions in public, and sending emails to people is an impersonal way of expressing how I feel. That is NOT good. Maybe it would be fine if you were talking to millions of people in a newspaper or on a website, but why do that for someone you see every day? If you can't find the time to talk, maybe you should MAKE time. Emails and chat rooms are always second to a real, live, unadulterated and uncensored conversation. We all seek to define our lives in terms and titles that we can understand. I want to be a physicist, he wants to be a poet, and so on. Those are just jobs. Or how about political parties: Democratic, Republican or (sadly) other? Am I a realist, a dreamer, a materialist, what IS it that makes us who we are? Sometimes everything gets so complicated I want to run away, to my imaginary cave by the seashore, where my wife and I hunt, fish, and tell stories around the campfire. Do I do that? For accuracy's sake, I don't have a wife, so I couldn't run away with her. But can I run away? SHOULD I run away? I used to think that escapism is acceptable when the situation is beyone hope, beyond reason, beyond our control. When you think about life, however, you realize that everything is beyond hope, reason, or our control. What do we do, when we hang on to our reality by a dangling thread over the fires of hell? (metaphorical, naturally, as I don't believe in hell) We do what anybody would do, we hold on for dear life. We hold onto anything we can, whether it can support us or not. Life isn't quite that desperate, but it can be close. A problem arises when you see someone holding on to thin air, imagining that they are protected because they feel secure. It is like the invisble pitfall, the illusion our eyes create. Technology is that imaginary piece of rope, that thing we clutch desperately but is helpless to provide us the support we need. To explain my metaphor, what can technology bestow upon us all? Does it bring us together? Yes, but in ways it should not. I don't care if we can make holographic representations of each other and maintain conversations at a distance, it isn't a flesh and blood human. I don't want to talk to someone who looks exactly like my loved one but holds no love for me, only photons. That is the question raised by science fiction writers, where does the human end, and where does he begin? Do we need to endlessly confuse the boundaries of man and machine, as we have already begun to do? Computers can play chess like us, they can imitate our thought, they might even be able to impersonate us. You know what? They might be able to do a damn fine job, better than most of us can. But we are human, and they are machine. We have created them; they are not the continuation of our species and legacy. It makes no sense to promote such a dangerous and disturbing invention. Continued on the next page. |